Yes, Virginia, there are patronising fools posing as members of parliament.

Your little friends are wrong.

“Dear Richard,

“I am an adult. Some of my adult friends say that all members of parliament have our best interests at heart and that they are intelligent and respectful. Papa says if you see it on substack it’s so. Please tell me the truth: are there patronising fools posing as members of parliament?

Virginia”

Virginia, your adult friends are wrong. They have been affected by the idiocy of an idiotic age. They believe anything they are told, and they disregard what they see. They think that anything can be, even if incomprehensible by their little minds.

Yes, Virginia, there are patronising fools posing as parliamentarians. They exist as certainly as lies and deception and corruption exist, and you know that they make all our lives more difficult, more desperate and sorrowful. Alas! How wonderful would be the world if there were no fools and tyrants. It would be as wonderful as you, Virginia. There would be childlike faith then, poetry, romance, to make tolerable this existence. We would have enjoyment, including in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would shine forth throughout adulthood.

Not to believe in corrupt politicians! You may as well believe a fairy can become a troll. You might get your papa to watch all the houses of parliament in the world, but even if they didn’t see a WEF bagman handing over wads of cash to an MP, what would that prove? Did you ever see a UN official transferring money to a Swiss bank account? Of course not, but that’s no proof they don’t. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wrongdoing, seen and unseen, in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside the curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No corrupt politicians! They live, and they’ll live forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years, they’ll continue to wreak their havoc in this world.

Richard

(apologies to Francis Church)

One doesn’t have to look too hard, these days, to find examples of foolish patronising poseurs - the various chambers of our state and federal parliaments are ‘target-rich environments’, as they say. A case in point has come to my attention, compelling me to expose the utter contempt in which some parliamentarians hold their constituents.

A correspondent, let’s call her ‘Virginia’, wrote to the Federal Member for Mackellar, Dr Sophie Scamps, concerning the machinations at the WHO and the very real threat to the sovereignty posed by the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). A ‘Constituent Liaison’ staff member penned an unsatisfactory reply. Par for the course. But it included a very galling unsolicited bit of emotional gaslighting, accusing Virginia of being an anxious, fearful, gullible idiot:

Your email indicates your level of anxiety, thank you for sharing it with Sophie.  Please be assured there is an answer to this fear campaign.

The email Virginia sent indicated nothing of the sort. It was polite, rational, and expressed concern.

But Virginia was not finished. She penned a much harder-hitting reply, demanding the member for Mackellar disclose her position on a number of specific examples of particular Articles in the IHR. This time, a different Constituent Liaison staff member replied, stating that the first Constituent Liaison staff member was not in the office but could respond next Wednesday. But again, the following presumptuous insult was included:

I recognize (sic) your anxiety over this issue and apologise for not being able to allay your fears today.

My Dad used to say, and still does, I guess, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” I’m not so generous. Once is enough for me to declare enemy action. Twice is more than enough.

Virginia is not to be trifled with. I expect this is not the end of the correspondence between her and the bevy of Constituent Liaison staff up there in Mackellar. If I were Virginia, this is what I would write back:

PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL - DR SOPHIE SCAMPS MP

Dear Dr Scamps

You may or may not be aware of the chain of correspondence between myself and your office (attached below).

I have expressed concern over the current machinations at the World Health Organisation which threaten the sovereignty of those nations who do not reject the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations. I received a first reply from your office which was unsatisfactory. I then asked a series of more pointed questions to which I would like to know your answer. A second reply indicated that the answers would be addressed at a later time. I look forward to that detailed reply. You may wish to familiarise yourself with this article by Libby Klein explaining the nature of the WHO changes and their relationship with Australia’s legislative environment, and the information contained at the links therein. The article refers extensively to Hansard and Senator Gallagher’s misunderstanding of precise questions from Senator Babet.

Equally concerning to me, however, is the liberty taken by not one but two of your Constituent Liaison staff in presuming to diagnose me as anxious and fearful, by including the following lines in their replies:

Your email indicates your level of anxiety, thank you for sharing it with Sophie.  Please be assured there is an answer to this fear campaign.

and

I recognize (sic) your anxiety over this issue and apologise for not being able to allay your fears today.

I can assure you I am not anxious. Furthermore, in the event that I do experience anxiety one day, you can be certain that I will not turn to a politician for help before I have exhausted every other avenue known to man and beast.

Likewise, I am not fearful. Nothing that has happened in the last 4 years has done anything but strengthen my conviction that our human rights, freedoms and dignity are worth fighting for. I, like many others, am not afraid of standing up for them.

The fact that two different staff members have included these lines echoing the anxiety and fear trope leads me to suspect that it may be a deliberate policy directive from you. If so, it is a disgraceful tactic and ought to be rescinded at once and an apology issued to all constituents who have been gaslighted like this. If not, and it is the result of a liberty taken by your staff, I expect that you should counsel them to avoid this in future.

If I were to indulge in a little amateur psychological diagnosis myself, one possibility I would consider is that you might be projecting your own anxiety and fear onto your constituents. I would further guess that said anxiety and fear might arise from the knowledge that the consequences of the safe and effective measures so familiar to us all were in fact disastrous, predictable, and punishable.

Kind regards,

Virginia.